Friday absolutely wiped us out, so we slept like babies all night. When I woke up at 7:15, I was a little confused – I’m not the early riser in the family, but I was up before my mom. Then I realized that 7:15 was actually 8:15, and the early hour made more sense. As soon as my mom heard me moving, she got up and we headed over to the buffet for breakfast.

Saturday morning was when we discovered Mexican coffee, and we were quite pleased with the discovery. I knew Mexican coffee had cinnamon in it, but I didn’t realize it also had orange peels and lemon peels. And sugar… so much sugar. No wonder it was delicious. We found a server we really liked, Omar, and stuck with him for the duration of our buffet visits. Once we’d had our fill, we went back to the room to change into our suits so that we could head to the beach.

We read online that there was no direct access to the beach via the Coba resort, but we kind of ignored it… but it turns out that’s sort of true. I’m sure you could get there if you walked, but we took the trolley, which took about 10 minutes. We actually went out a gate and into another resort, so going on foot would have been weird. The trolley dropped us off directly on the beach, though, so it was no big deal.

The first thing that we noticed was the seaweed. We were prepared for it, having read recent reviews online, but it’s hard to visualize. The resort workers were constantly in the water with a net, trying to catch as much seaweed as possible, and there are giant barriers set up in the water to try to block the seaweed from coming ashore. You can kind of see the barriers to the right and in front of my legs in this picture:

Regardless, what you see in the picture is highly representative of what we did all day on Saturday. We went into the water – chilly at first, but then very comfortable once you’ve acclimated – then went back to the lounge chairs, then went to the bar (Jose, the bartender at the beach bar, is awesome), back to the chairs, and then back into the water when we got too hot. At one point, I walked the length of the beach to the end of the next resort, and took a quick dip in their pool. When I got back, I realized my mistake – I’d forgotten to reapply sunscreen before leaving on my walk, so I was toasted (in more ways than one) when I got back. Ouch.

Let’s take a look at just how bad I am at taking beach panoramas:

Yep, pretty bad.

We went to the Tulum resort’s buffet for lunch, but it had pretty much the same food as Coba’s. That was fine, since we liked the Coba buffet. After lunch, we stopped at one of the Tulum pools before heading back to the Coba pools.

I was curious to see what the resort would do for Halloween, even though neither of us are big fans of Halloween. All of the workers in the resort had “scary” makeup on, and even the buffet was dressed up. They had tons of pumpkins carved, and lots of decorations everywhere.

Some of the pumpkin carvings were intricate and impressive.

After dinner, we went to the lobby to hang out for a while. We noticed fire off in one corner, so of course we gravitated that way. There was a server making Mexican, Irish, and Spanish coffees for people, using liquor and fire. We both ordered a Mexican coffee, but I was a little sad that their version of decaf was a packet of instant decaf. You’d think they’d have brewed decaf, right? (I know, I’m in the minority here, but I can’t think brewed coffee is that much more expensive than instant.)

By the end of the day, we were pretty knackered. The sun and the heat take a lot out of you! We headed back to the room around 10:30, where we watched the last half of The Pianist before drifting off to sleep.